Related papers: Positrons from pulsar winds
Rotation-powered radio pulsars are born with inferred initial rotation periods of order 300 ms (some as short as 20 ms) in core-collapse supernovae. In the traditional picture, this fast rotation is the result of conservation of angular…
Several Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWNe) have been detected in the TeV band in the last decade.The TeV emission is typically interpreted in a purely leptonic scenario, but this usually requires that the magnetic field in the Nebula be much lower…
Pulsars are one of the possible final stages in the evolution of massive stars. If a supernova explosion is anisotropic, it can give the pulsar a powerful kick, propelling it to supersonic speeds. The resulting pulsar wind nebula is…
We report on our finding of an excess of $54^{+16}_{-15}$ neutrinos at the location of the pulsar wind nebula (PWN) G63.7+1.1. By analyzing the IceCube track-like neutrino data for a group of 14 PWNe, which are selected as the targets…
Neutron stars are excellent emitters of gravitational waves. Squeezing matter beyond nuclear densities invites exotic physical processes, many of which violently transfer large amounts of mass at relativistic velocities, disrupting…
The collapse of young massive stars or the coalescence of a black hole-neutron star binary is expected to give rise to a black hole-torus system. When the torus is strongly magnetized, the black hole produces electron-positron outflow along…
Pulsars have mean space velocities >~500 km/s. The consequent ram pressure results in tight confinement of the star's energetic wind, driving a bow shock into the surrounding medium. Pulsar bow shocks have long been regarded as a curiosity,…
Observations by the Fermi Large Area Telescope of gamma-ray millisecond pulsar light curves imply copious pair production in their magnetospheres, and not exclusively in those of younger pulsars. Such pair cascades may be a primary source…
Positrons are known to be produced in interactions between cosmic-ray nuclei and interstellar matter ("secondary production"). Positrons may, however, also be created by dark matter particle annihilations in the galactic halo or in the…
Neutron stars and black holes are the most compact astrophysical objects we can think of and as a consequence they are the main sources of gravitational waves. There are many astrophysically relevant scenarios in which these objects are…
A wind nebula generating extended X-ray emission was recently detected surrounding Swift 1834.9-0846. This is the first magnetar for which such a (pulsar) wind nebula (PWN) was found. I demonstrate that Swift 1834.9-0846's nebula can be…
Many pulsars propagate through the interstellar medium (ISM) with supersonic velocities, and their pulsar winds interact with the interstellar medium (ISM), forming bow shocks and magnetotails (PWN). We model the propagation of pulsars…
A typical young pulsar slows down at an imperceptible rate, its spin period increasing by less than 10 microseconds over the course of a year. However, the inertia of a pulsar is so extreme that to effect this tiny change in rotation rate,…
We investigate the conditions required for the production of electron-positron pairs above a pulsar polar cap (PC) and the influence of pair production on the energetics of the primary particle acceleration. Assuming space-charge limited…
We consider nebulae which are created around binary systems containing rotation powered pulsars and companion stars with strong stellar winds. It is proposed that the stellar and pulsar winds have to mix at some distance from the binary…
Pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) are clouds of the magnetized relativistic electron/positron plasma supplied from the central pulsar. However, the number of radio-emitting particles inside a PWN is larger than the expectation from the study of…
Recent TeV observations of nearby pulsars with the HAWC telescope have been interpreted as evidence that the diffusion of high-energy electrons and positrons within pulsar wind nebulae is highly inefficient compared to the rest of the…
We review the physics of relativistic shocks, which are often invoked as the sources of non-thermal particles in pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe), gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), and active galactic nuclei (AGN) jets, and as possible sources of…
A forefront area of research concerns the exploration of the properties of hadronic matter under extreme conditions of temperature and density, and the determination of the equation of state--the relation between pressure, temperature and…
Neutron Stars are among the most exotic objects in the Universe. A neutron star, with a mass of 1.4-2 Solar masses within a radius of about 10-15 km, is the most compact stable configuration of matter in which degeneracy pressure can still…